Listicles, tweets, your ex’s Facebook status, picture of dogs wearing costumes — the Internet offers no shortage of entertaining stuff to look at. But there’s plenty of substantial writing out there, too, the pieces you spend a few minutes reading and a long time thinking about after you’ve closed the tab. In this weekly feature, Flavorwire shares the best of that category. This week: two essays you must read, American writers writing Russians, Sara Marcus on We are the Best!, and more.
“My Sister Lived In Silence” by Matthew Derby, BuzzFeed
Derby hits us with this crushing essay about a sister he hardly knew, and how writing a book helped him get closer to her long after her death.
“Trigger for What” by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The New Inquiry
With all the talk about trigger warnings lately, Phoebe Maltz Bovy looks at how, even though they’re “plainly ridiculous” in the college classroom, it is still “easy to forget the possibly quite sensible place such a request might be coming from.”
“We Are The Best! Proves That Punk Rock Never Dies” by Sara Marcus, The Concourse
If you’re going to get somebody to write about a movie about punk girls in the 1980s, Sara Marcus, who wrote the book on the Riot Grrrl movement, is really the best you can find.
“Why So Many American Novels to Make Fun of Russian Accents? Is Odd” by Katy Waldman, Slate
What’s the deal with American books turning their Eastern European characters into total clichés? Have a lot of these writers even met real Russians? Waldman examines this weird trend in literature.
“Prey” by Kathleen Hale, Hazlitt
We end this with this essay by Kathleen Hale, a piece that is so harrowing and brave that there’s no way to describe it that would do it any justice. Just trust us that you should read it when nobody is around and share it with everybody you know.